Hugh McLean
Love and The Sea Gull1
In a letter to his friend Aleksei Suvorin as he was finishing The Sea Gull, Chekhov said that it contained 5 "poods" of love, along with four acts, a landscape with a lake, very little action, and a lot of talk about literature.2 A pood was a pre-metric Russian weight measure equivalent to 16
1/2 kilos or 36 lbs. So we have 180 pounds of love in the play, which I take as a lot.
What kind of love? Chekhovian love seems to be mostly the kind that makes trouble and suffering for the people who engage in it and by the same token offers dramatic opportunities to the playwright--in short, unhappy love, love mostly unrequited. Chekhov also probably considered such unhappy love truer, more characteristic of real human life. In
The Sea Gull we have no boy-meets-girl scenario, but instead a whole basketful of love triangles, each fraught with dramatic tension, two people competing for the love of the third. It may be two men vying for the love of one woman, Kostia Treplev and Trigorin for Nina; or it may be two women competing for one man, Arkadina and Nina for Trigorin. Or it may be a triangle without competition, where the love is totally one-sided and one-directional, and the love object does not respond at all to the lover's love. Masha is hopelessly in love with Kostia, but she only annoys him with her persistent attentions. She marries the devoted wimp Medvedenko (making a new triangle of two men and one woman), in the hope of curing herself. But it doesn't work--at least it hasn't worked by the fourth act--and she takes typically Russian refuge in alcohol. As if this were not enough, Chekhov adds yet another triangle in the older generation. Masha's mother Polina can't stand her husband, the estate manager Shamraev, and is in love with Dr. Dorn. Her affair with him is apparently of long standing, since there are hints that Masha is Dorn's daughter, made explicit in surviving earlier drafts of the play; and Masha instinctively feels much closer to Dorn than to her nominal father. But Dorn, who (like Chekhov himself) has apparently enjoyed a rich career as a ladies' man, is not interested in renewing the affair with Polina at this stage in his life. He seems to feel that he has had enough. He has lived his life "with taste," and at 55 thinks it is time to retire. As he makes clear to Sorin, doctors have no cure for old age (this was long before Viagra!). Doctors also have no prescription for unrequited love, as Dorn sadly remarks to Masha. They cannot set broken hearts.
Besides all these conventional love triangles, the play contains yet another one, the "Oedipal" triangle consisting of Arkadina, her son Kostia Treplev, and her lover Trigorin. Kostia's involvement with his mother is of course not sexual, except perhaps at some deep, Freudian level not articulated in the play. It is rather a longing for nurture, for the kind of mothering--attention, affection, tenderness--that Arkadina never gave him. She can beautifully play the role of the loving mother, but to be one is beyond her powers. This yearning puts Kostia in competition with her lover Trigorin, whom, in addition, he later also rivals as a writer. The tensions of this "Oedipal" triangle provoke the echoes from
Hamlet exchanged so appropriately by actress mother and writer son. In general, it seems to provide more dramatic energy than any of the other triangles. Kostia exhibits a typical neurosis, the inability to move beyond an early trauma, to leave the past behind. At 25, he is still vainly trying to force his narcissistic mother to give him the kind of love he had needed as a little boy.
Speaking of Oedipus, it is striking that we learn next to nothing about Kostia's actual father. We know his name, Gavriil Treplev, and the fact that his passport bore the official designation "kievskii meshchanin," meaning an artisan or shopkeeper from Kiev. This definition of legal status was passed on to his son. The word
meshchanin also carries a derogatory connotation roughly equivalent to the English "philistine," and Arkadina mocks Kostia with it during their quarrel in the bandaging scene--quite unfairly, of course, since Kostia was anything but a philistine, in the first place, and had no responsibility for his official legal status, which came automatically from his father (Arkadina's choice of husband). Beyond that, we know only that Gavriil Treplev, was once a "well known actor." This career is put in the past tense, but he is apparently still alive. However, he seems to have no contact with his son, and he certainly gives him no money. A zero of a father and a narcissistic mother--not a good psychological heritage for poor Kostia. Luckily, he has had in Sorin an affectionate bachelor uncle with whom he has bonded closely. But it was not enough, partly because Sorin is also a wimp: he allows his entire pension to be absorbed by Shamraev in running the estate and has nothing left to give to Kostia, whose mother is a skinflint and will give him nothing.
Obviously the common denominator in these loves is that they are all unhappy--some very unhappy, others less so. At the beginning we see Nina and Kostia exchange a kiss, and we might at first take them for typical young lovers destined for a typical happy ending to this "comedy," whatever vicissitudes and obstacles must be overcome before they reach it. But Nina soon becomes infatuated with the glamorous Trigorin, a famous writer whose works she admires; and she in effect throws herself at him, using a device Chekhov carried over from his own life. A married lady named Lidiia Avilova had sent Chekhov a locket engraved with a page and line reference to one of his collections of stories.3 When identified, the line read, "If you ever want my life, come and take it." Like Dr. Dorn, Dr. Chekhov did not want Avilova's life, but he did take her melodramatic message and put it in his play.4
We never see the "happy" phase of Nina's romance with Trigorin, which takes place in the two-year interval between Acts Three and Four. During that time they carried on their affair in Moscow, though he seems somehow to have managed to do it clandestinely, without breaking with Arkadina. By the time the action resumes in Act Four the affair is over. He has tired of Nina and is back with Arkadina full time. Nina seems all tragedy now, with an overdose of life's hard knocks: she had a baby that died; she is having a tough time with her acting career; as we suspected in Act One, she has an evil stepmother and an unloving father; and she still loves Trigorin.
At the end of the play the love triangles have pretty much reverted to what they were at the beginning, or at least the end of the first act. Masha is still in love with Kostia despite her marriage to Medvedenko and the baby she had with him. Trigorin has returned to being dominated by Arkadina. He does not seem to like it much, but he lacks the will to move on. "I have no will of my own," he laments. For Arkadina he is part of her aureole of glamour--a famous writer, younger than she, at her feet and in her bed. Nina still loves Trigorin, but recognizes that her case is hopeless and makes no effort to see him. Kostia still loves Nina, equally hopelessly.
The writer Nikolai Leskov, a friend of Chekhov's, once said that all love stories can be reduced to two variants: He fell in love and got married; or he fell in love and shot himself. In Russian you can say all that in four words, and they rhyme:
vliubilsia, zhenilsia; vliubilsia, zastrelilsia.5 Chekhov later used the same formula, perhaps learned from Leskov: writing to Suvorin about the dearth of workable endings for comedies, he complained, "The hero either gets married or shoots himself; there is no other way out."6 In
The Sea Gull Chekhov has obviously opted for Plot No. 2: Kostia shoots himself at the end. If the suicide was designed to punish Nina or his mother, or both, for not loving him enough, it was a terrible waste, clearly not worth the price. Both women will be sorry for a while, but both will get over it, as Kostia would eventually have gotten over his despair. The suicide is not tragic, not fateful; it is silly, wasteful, neurotic. Perhaps that helps explain why Chekhov could call a comedy a play that ends in a suicide: for a sufficiently detached observer, who views human life under the aspect of eternity, the absurd, self-destructive behavior of neurotics appears essentially comic. Why are people such fools?
What is Chekhov saying about love by all this? To answer this question we will have to reach beyond The Sea Gull to some of his other works, in an effort to construct what we might call Chekhov's "philosophy of love." First, as argued above, he seems to be saying that unhappy love is more interesting dramatically. In this respect he appears to be in conflict with Shakespeare, at least Shakespeare as a writer of comedies. I made a sort of love census of Shakespeare's comedies and some tragedies and find a very different pattern. What usually interests Shakespeare as plot foundations are the obstacles put in the way of
requited loves by external forces. The love of Romeo and Juliet is star-crossed because their families are feuding and as a result they have severe communication difficulties; but there is no doubt about
their reciprocity. In almost all the comedies the reciprocated love is taken for granted as an established fact. The only unrequited love I find in Shakespeare's comedies is that of Helena for Bertram in
All's Well That Ends Well, whose legal marriage had not been consummated. But it seems to be assumed that once Bertram has been forced to sleep with her, all will indeed end well.7 In almost all the comedies the happy ending is a wedding, often a double or triple one.
Love's Labor Lost gets the prize, with a quintuple wedding, though postponed for a year as a punishment. What follows after these weddings does not interest Shakespeare as a writer of comedies. The convention assumes that wedding bells mean wedded bliss, and society can be reassured that a new generation will be duly generated.8 Chekhov has violated this convention in every way. He calls his play a comedy, but it ends in a suicide. There is no wedding, and Nina's baby is dead. Masha's and Medvedenko's baby lives, but without any love from its mother. What are we to make of this? What is Chekhov's philosophy of love?
I find of Chekhov that he is a curious combination--a pessimist about love, and at the same time a romantic. He is a pessimist because, as
The Sea Gull demonstrates so clearly, anyone's chances for reciprocated love are poor. All the plays are full of unfulfilled loves. In
Uncle Vanya Astrov and Uncle Vanya are captivated by the beautiful Elena, but Elena herself is only faintly stirred by Astrov and though she may feel some pity for him, finds Vanya's attentions and protestations of love only irritating. Sonya is hopelessly in love with Astrov. In
The Three Sisters Olga is an old maid who says she would marry just about anyone who asked, but nobody asks. Irina longs for a love that never comes, perhaps through her own incapacity to love--the locked piano whose key is lost. Finally she decides to marry without love, and even that design is frustrated by Tusenbach's murder. Only Masha, already married to a pompous bore, has--at last!--a really passionate, fully reciprocated love affair, adulterous on both sides. But it cannot last: Vershinin is transferred; he has daughters for whom he feels responsible; and to break up two marriages seems impossible. In
The Cherry Orchard Ranevskaia returns to an absolutely no-good lover in Paris; Lopakhin cannot bring himself to propose to Varia; and Ania will obviously outgrow Petia, as Nadia in "The Betrothed" outgrows her liberator Sasha. Even the maid Duniasha, adored by accident-prone Epikhodov, pines for the worthless cad Iasha, for whom she is only a momentary amusement; he longs for the fleshpots of Paris. The only wedding anywhere in Chekhov's plays is Andrei's to Natasha in
The Three Sisters, and that is soon seen to have been a huge mistake, though it does produce two live babies (one of whom may not be Andrei's child).
Besides the unlikelihood of reciprocity, love in Chekhov seems to be governed by a timer, a sort of love clock; and people's love clocks do not run at the same speed. You may enjoy a reciprocated love for a while, but your partner's clock may run down long before yours does, and you are left stranded. This happens to Anna in the play
Ivanov and to Misail, hero of the great short story "My Life," whose wife, also called Masha, tires of him and their life together and flies away. The title of the story "Three Years" seems to indicate the average term for a love clock. In that story the hero falls madly in love, and the heroine marries him without love to escape from her father and the provinces. After three years of marriage (and another dead baby) she is beginning to fall in love with her husband, while in the meantime he has cooled to the point of indifference.
So Chekhov's pessimism is clear. Your chances that the person you love will love you back are poor, and even if they do, either your love clock or theirs is likely to run down before long. Long-lasting, happy, or even stable, comfortable relationships are virtually unknown in Chekhov.
The only story where reciprocated love remains active and fulfilled at the end is the celebrated "Lady with a Pet Dog." Like that of Vershinin and Masha in
The Three Sisters, Gurov's and Anna Sergeevna's love is adulterous on both sides, and like Vershinin, the man has not only a wife, but also children for whom he feels responsible. The possibility of divorce and remarriage--difficult in Russia because in cases of divorce on grounds of adultery the guilty party was not allowed to remarry--is not directly discussed. The story concludes with the two lovers, whose love clocks are still very much in sync, searching vainly for a solution to the dilemma of their enforced separation. The concluding sentence seems to hold out hope:
And it seemed that in a little while a solution would be found and a new, beautiful life would begin; and it was clear to both of them that there was still a long, long way to go, and that the most complicated and difficult part was only beginning.
The sentence, however, is in erlebte Rede, and an authorial irony may shine through such inflated, optimistic phrases as "a new, beautiful life."
It is curious that earlier the narrator, in his own voice, describes their love as if they were happily married: "Anna Sergeevna and he [Gurov] loved each other like very close, related people,
like husband and wife, like tender friends" (my italics). Yet such close and lasting love between a husband and wife is nowhere represented in Chekhov. Nevertheless, the phrase shows that he still evidently cherished it as an ideal.
What about the romanticism? We might see a certain romantic aura in The Sea Gull, with its magic lake and talented, good-looking people, and its five poods of love. But besides "The Lady with the Pet Dog" the romanticism appears most explicitly in the short story called "About Love" (1898). The hero, Alekhin, who tells his own story to two visiting friends, is a landowner who, unlike most Russian gentry, including Sorin in
The Sea Gull, is a hard-working farmer, struggling to make his farm earn enough to pay off the debts his father had incurred to finance his education. It is hard, demanding, incessant work. Alekhin doesn't really like it; he would prefer a clean, comfortable city job, but feels obligated. He is appointed to a commission that requires him to come to town frequently. Another member of the commission, an official, invites him home to dinner. The official has a young wife and two children, apparently a happy home. Alekhin goes there frequently and eventually becomes a family friend, almost a family member, called "Uncle" by the children. Time passes, and it becomes clear to Alekhin that he and his friend's wife have fallen in love. What should he do? The barriers to their love are formidable: her marriage, the children, his friendship with her husband; and what could he offer her? A drab existence in the country on a muddy farm. So their love remains undeclared and unfulfilled. It takes a heavy toll on her, and she becomes ill and is being sent to the Crimea to recuperate. At just this time the husband is transferred to a distant province. Alekhin comes to the station to see her off. For a moment they find themselves alone in her compartment:
Our eyes met, strength of spirit deserted us both. I embraced her, she pressed her face against my chest and tears flowed from her eyes. Kissing her face, her shoulders, and her hands, all wet with tears--O, how unhappy she and I were!--I declared my love for her, and with a burning pain in my heart I understood how unnecessary, petty, and deceptive was everything that had hindered our love. I understood that in reasoning about love, one must either start with something higher and more important than happiness or unhappiness, sin or virtue in their usual meanings, or one should not reason at all.
In a startling anticlimax, however, Alekhin does not act on this conclusion; he only tells about it later. The lady rides off to the Crimea, and apparently he never sees her again. But the conclusion seems to be Chekhov's own. Reciprocated love is so precious and so rare that even if it is destined to be short-lived and ephemeral, still the experience itself is so valuable that we should let nothing stand in its way. All the phrases about marriage vows and adultery, about friendship and responsibility to children are just that, conventional phrases. Real life is somewhere else. This is Chekhov the romantic.
About love one should not think too much, as intellectuals are prone to do. At the beginning of the story Chekhov has Alekhin say, "Up to now only one incontrovertible truth has been stated about love, that "this is a great mystery." The quotation of course comes from Scripture, St. Paul's epistle to the Ephesians (5:32), quoting Genesis 2:24: "For this cause shall a man leave his father and his mother and shall be joined unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh. This is a great mystery…" St. Paul goes on to say that this image of sexual union is a metaphor for the conjunction of Christ and the church, but of course neither Alekhin nor Chekhov was thinking of that.
Love is a great mystery, and it can lead to deep and long-lasting bonds, to "one flesh," as Chekhov hinted at the end of "A Lady with a Pet Dog." In that same year, 1898, when he wrote "About Love," Chekhov at last, at the age of 38, after many love affairs of varying durations and intensities, met the love of his own life, the actress Olga Knipper, who played the role of Arkadina in the famous Moscow Art Theater production of
The Sea Gull. It took some time for them to acknowledge their love and to free themselves to live it. But they finally did, and Chekhov and Olga were married in May, 1901. So Chekhov had acted on his romantic principles: put love foremost, don't let it slip away. Chekhov's and Olga's love clocks were apparently in sync and running vigorously.9 But alas, the clock of Chekhov's life was all too quickly running down. The tuberculosis bacillus that had been eating away at his lungs for twenty years was relentlessly winning. The end came in July, 1904, after a marriage whose duration, with cruel irony, had echoed his title, three years. Olga lived on until 1959.
© H.McLean
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TSQ 34
Toronto Slavic Annual 2003
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